Machine Gun Preacher’ uses Bible, bullets to help save abused kids

Thursday

Sep 29, 2011 at 12:01 AMSep 29, 2011 at 12:34 PM

On Friday, moviegoers will be introduced to Sam Childers, a former motorcycle gang member and former drug dealer turned “machine gun preacher,” a man of God who’s willing to go to great lengths to save and protect children from all over the globe, even if that means bearing arms.

Bret Michel

On Friday, moviegoers will be introduced to Sam Childers, a former motorcycle gang member and former drug dealer turned “machine gun preacher,” a man of God who’s willing to go to great lengths to save and protect children from all over the globe, even if that means bearing arms.

Gerard Butler portrays Childers in Marc (“The Kite Runner”) Forster’s film. As you might expect from a film titled, yes, “Machine Gun Preacher,” the muscled “300” star is in full action mode, even when he’s not-so-heroically breaking down crackhouse doors both to steal money and to get that next fix during the first third of the film, before a religious conversion steers him toward Africa, and more specifically, to Sudan, which is where the film aims its focus on Childers’ child-saving efforts.

Meeting with Childers, founder of the Angels of East Africa rescue organization, it’s hard not to note the ironic choice of location for my interview with the real-life ex-con: Boston’s luxurious Liberty Hotel, which in a previous incarnation was known as the Charles Street Jail. Sitting in a comfortable chair on a balcony overlooking what was once a lineup of cold prison cells, Childers doesn’t shy away from talking about his past.

“In my previous life, I was not a good person. I was probably the …” He pauses for a brief moment, pursing his lips behind a brushy, Sam Elliott-like mustache, his eyes narrowing before he says: “Y’know, I was the scum of the Earth. I was probably the meanest person you’d ever have met. Not a good person at all.

“But,” he continues, his eyes widening, “what I do now, is I rescue children. I’ll rescue a child anywhere around the world I have an opportunity.”

In the U.S., he cites the problems of drugs, alcohol and sex trafficking.

“People will actually pay from $20,000 to $50,000 to have sex with a 10-year-old little girl,” he said, shaking his head. “This stuff needs to be brought down.”

Some of this may be detailed in a proposed reality TV series he said he hopes will begin airing in the late spring or early summer. He’s also producing a documentary based on his life. Acknowledging that Forster’s film is an “amped up” account of his life – albeit one that he’s happy with (“If I didn’t support it, I wouldn’t be here right now”) – Childers declares that his “doco” presents “the real life of the Machine Gun Preacher.”

The documentary is compiled from a lifetime of footage of the 49-year-old (“My dad used to be big into the old 8 mm cameras … so we have film all the way back from when I was 5 years old”), plus interviews with former schoolteachers, classmates and girlfriends. Childers said he hopes to get it into theaters by February or March.

But first, he’s got this film to promote, and he’s candid about the differences between reality and what ended up onscreen. While some surface details are accurate – Butler sports convincing re-creations of the tattoos on Childers’ bulky arms, for example – the fictionalized version of the preacher’s story compresses the timeline of his spiritual awakening. And his best friend in the film (played by Michael Shannon, an Oscar nominee for his supporting role in “Revolutionary Road”) is a composite of six different people Childers ran with in his darker days.

But what of the way the movie paints him as a bit of a mercenary?

“I wished I was,” he said, laughing. “They make good money.”

Instead, he prefers to think of himself as a rebel, someone who’s willing to fight for a cause.

“And you know, they called Jesus a rebel, too.”

Pointing to the tattoo of a shield emblazoned with the words “Machine Gun Preacher” on his right shoulder, Childers says, “I’m gonna be honest with you about one thing. That name was given to me by people in the bush because I slept on a grass matt with a mosquito net hanging from a tree, with a Bible one side, and a machine gun the other. But the name ‘Machine Gun Preacher’ is more of a marketing tool. It gives me a platform to speak from. But when it comes right down to it, am I a man of total violence? No way. I’m a man that helps people.”

In the film, as in real life, Childers establishes an orphanage in Sudan five-week mission opens his eyes to the horrors perpetrated by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Ugandan militia led by Joseph Kony and accused of killing and raping children.

However, Childers repeatedly stresses that the real villain is the president of Northern Sudan, Omar al-Bashir.

“He is the man that caused the genocide in Darfur, caused the genocide in South Sudan. South Sudan just got their independence July 9 of this year, but there’s still fighting in the Blue Nile. They’re still fighting in the Nuba Mountains. All caused by President Bashir. Kony’s fully financed by Bashir.”

Childers spends about seven months a year in Africa. As in the movie, these long separations have been tough on his wife and, especially, his daughter.

“My daughter and me lost our relationship,” he said. “When she graduated at 17, she came to me, and she said, ‘Dad, we gotta talk.’ I thought she wanted to go to college, but she said, ‘Dad, I want to run the nonprofit.’ And I’m like, ‘A couple of years earlier, you hated me.’ And she said, ‘Dad, you remember when there was times we didn’t have much money for food? I ate at the same table you ate from. If anyone knows how to sacrifice for this mission, I do.’ And I said, ‘You’re hired!’

“She has that same compassion, that same drive, that same determination for the children as I did. As a matter of fact, her husband leaves on Monday to Africa. And he’ll be over there for like a month straight. So, she seen that dedication, and she seen why I did it. And now,” he beams, “she’s on the same crusade.”